I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

The Sports Car, The Laptop And The Science Behind The Golden Proportion

Our eyes are attracted to beautiful things, and designers exploit this fact to make us want their products. And what we find attractive can very often be described through a simple proportion—the golden rectangle. Case in point, the 2014 Aston Martin Rapide S (above), every detail of which, is governed by this 5:8 ratio. “The ‘Golden Ratio’ sits at the heart of every Aston Martin. Balanced from any angle, each exterior line of Rapide S works in concert and every proportion is precisely measured to create a lithe, pure form.” Every detail, but not the overall shape, from either the front or the side. These internal rhymes of the golden proportions give the overall design coherence, but it’s still a vehicle, not the Parthenon.

For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.

Experiments going back to the 19th century repeatedly show that people invariably prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.

Then, in 2009, a Duke University professor demonstrated that our eyes can scan an image fastest when its shape is a golden rectangle. For instance, it’s the ideal layout of a paragraph of text, the one most conducive to reading and retention. This simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world, and without realizing it, we employ it wherever we can.

That Duke professor, readers of this blog will recognize, is Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University and the author of Design in Nature which describe his Constructal Law of physics. In Bejan’s theory, he describes eye movement as a combination of “long and the fast” horizontal moves and “short and slow” vertical ones. The actual equations for this support a field of vision identical to the 5:8 Golden Rectangle.

Interestingly, in terms of today’s tech news, Google‘s new Chromebook Pixel, with it’s 3:2 screen proportion might seem to not observe this aesthetic law, leading some to characterize it as “boxy.” Apple‘s competing Retina MacBook Pro, however, nails the screen proportion dead on (see image below). Note that HD video is actually wider than golden, ostensibly to feel immersive by being wider than your field of view, so Apple made a very specific choice with its laptops to choose this ratio. [On it's iMacs (and the 11-inch MacBook Air) it uses the native 16:9 proportion of HD video.]

But if we slap our golden proportion overlay on the Chromebook Pixel, though, another kind of golden rectangle is apparent. The active screen area in Chrome OS is the area above the launcher and status bar at the bottom of the screen. So, in effect, the 3:2 screen proportion gives you an actual golden rectangle of usable screen—once you remove the “chrome” of the OS.

This raises an interesting issue of design philosophy between Google and Apple. This can be seen as an example of the way that Google is more user-focused and Apple is more consumer-focused. Think about this seemingly small distinction. At the level of selling products—what they look like in advertising and in a store display—the absolute proportion of the screen sends that beautiful golden-proportion message. But in actual use, the “chrome” of an OS (or even in full-screen mode, the “chrome” of an application) cuts into that space making it shorter than optimal. By building an allowance for “chrome” into the screen size of the Chromebook Pixel, Google has created a more pleasing active work area. But you won’t discover that until you actually use it.

This is a subtle point, but it does, at least, help to make sense of why Google would buck the trend towards golden and HD proportioned screens in favor of another long-considered (though now obsolete) pleasing rectangle, the 3:2 proportion of 35mm film. But like the internal proportions in the Rapide S, the choice of which harmonies are important is a deep design decision that emerges from how the designer imagines their product will be used.

In the case of the car, these proportions don’t help the car go any faster, but they may well quicken the pulse of a prospective buyer, or cause that buyer to drive the Rapide S more than one of their other expensive sports cars (if you have one $200,000 car, you probably have five!) And the same could be said for the laptop. Apple is focusing on the consumer experience while Google, I suspect, is thinking more about the workers that will use the Pixel (40,000 of their own, perhaps?) who have to be happy and productive on it but may not be making the actual purchasing decision.

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